If we move to renewables, over 100 years there would be 0 reason to have a single nuclear plant running anywhere, apart from making nuclear weapons fuel. I just wish we were now where we would/will be in 50 years in terms of renewables technology maturity and its spread.
So, if electrification cannot be done on this, industrial society as we know it is doomed, and nuclear cannot save it. Unless you're thinking we're going to have nuclear reactors in our mining vehicles...
Uranium has to be mined.
It really does appear that believing in renewables as a way to perpetuate industrial society at scale has become part of some people's identity, and regardless of any actual study on the subject, this belief appears to be a necessity to be part of non-deplorable human society.
Nuclear reactors are a safe way to electrify as much as can be and reduce the body blows societies are going to take in the coming decades. Some industry is not doomed, and social stability can be maintained, at some cost, if and only if we use all technologies at our disposal for what they are, and calculate the risks and rewards right.
Facts are sadly unmoved by any faith, and the real path forward as painful as it may be, is only open to those that accept that they can always be wrong, and will always have to learn more.
Please pfdietz cite your sources and please prove me wrong.
The lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgy0rW0oaFI&list=PLMDQXkItOZ...
The (already provided in a previous comment) EROEI study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X1...
The one specific slide about the low EROEI of solar panel is in: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJvoAm__WVtumohStkF4KwT66cS... The 2.7 value is from 2019, as calculated for Spain, this one slide is in english. Panels have not made a x10 EROEI explosion in the past 5 years, a lot of the energy costs in that calculation are independent of panel technology improvements.
Elsewhere, with more reasonable boundaries, one finds EROEI is much higher, and has been found to be better than for fossil fuels. An EROEI of about 8 for PV in Switzerland, for example (and Switzerland is not the sunniest place on Earth; the EROEI would be even higher at those locations; it also becomes higher as renewable technology advances, for example with longer lifespans and thinner PV cells.)
That EROEI can't be bad should be obvious. Energy is only a small fraction of the cost of making renewable equipment. If EROEI were bad then renewables could not be as cheap as they are. That they are being sold so cheaply debunks the EROEI arguments directly.
And isn't coal responsible for all that concrete nuclear plants there are built with? The vision of a nuclear-powered world implicitly assumes concrete will produced in some other way; this is a harder task that replacing coal electricity with renewable electricity.
If the world and industrial civilization are going to survive, it's either nuclear or renewables.
Also note that you seem to mean new-renewables (wind and solar) when you write "renewables". At this point and for a long time the large-scale and frequent renewables are hydropower and biomass, that are renewable, but are not new.
What would a disinterested observer make of this?
They'd look for objective evidence to determine which of us is closer to reality.
For example, they might look at what the world is doing right now. What is being installed, renewables or nuclear? Presumably those who are spending money are trying to get the most bang for the buck.
If we look at that, renewables are soundly trouncing nuclear. Even in China, that country that is held up as the last best hope by nuclear advocates. New installs (which reflect the current conditions better than total installed capacity, which is a lagging indicator) are massively in favor of renewables there and elsewhere.
The nuclear advocate who explains away nuclear's troubles as due to the selective omnipotence of greens (selective, since they don't seem to be doing nearly as well on other issues) must really stretch their conspiracy theorizing to explain such a widespread result.
I will also note that you didn't explain how nuclear can power mining in a way that renewables can't.
Show me one model that does work with any technology, please, any source anywhere I promise I will review.
Mining to get renewables to anything like the GWHours needed is very significant, look at the graphs in the data I provided
Instead of any kind of data that would show me how I am wrong, all the data I am getting is downvotes and wordage.
Are these arguments what led you to the belief, or are they rationalizations you've tried to construct after the fact? They don't appear to be things that a skeptical, rigorously rational person would have come up with.
For copper, as with many other underground resources, discoveries eventually decline over time. It's similar for oil: the peak of annual discoveries of "conventional" oil fields—everything except shale oil—was 60 years ago, and 50 years ago for gas.
Additionally, the copper content in new mines tends to decrease: it is now about 0.5% on average (it was ten times higher a century ago). This means that to extract one kg of copper, you need to extract, crush, and process 200 kg of rock. The higher this number, the more energy is required for a mine to maintain the same production.
For the current production of 20 million tons of copper per year, a few billion tons of ore need to be processed annually—more than for iron! Incidentally, over a billion tons of rock is also processed annually to extract 3,000 tons of gold.
The International Energy Agency has long pointed out that copper production may start to decline in the coming years (even though more is needed in its decarbonization scenarios). A 15-year forecast is reasonably relevant because it takes this long—or even 20 years—to bring a new mine into operation after discovery.
It's not just about permits: roads must be built, a power network for high-power machines, water supply and wastewater treatment facilities, processing plants, etc.
Thus, the production from existing and planned mines is fairly predictable over the next one to two decades. Is it serious if there's less copper?
Maybe, for electrifying 1.5 billion two-ton vehicles. For having only half or a third of that fleet consisting of small vehicles (an electric bicycle requires 100 times fewer materials than an electric car, and there are, of course, intermediate possibilities), maybe not.
For energy, the economic world has not understood that the signal of its decline won't be an indefinite price increase but a contraction of "physical" production (happening in Europe since 2007). A decline in energy means a shortfall in production, hence incomes, leading to less energy but less solvent consumers, with a new price that could settle "anywhere."
For a systemic metal, it will be the same: reduced supply will result in decreased material production, but not necessarily an indefinite price increase. The economy is primarily about the physical!
Of course if we ignore the need for batteries. Renewable advocates conveniently forget to include that in the calculus (there’s active action in progress to strip mine the ocean floor creating untold ecological damage to try to keep up with requirements for batteries). And they also tend to ignore the fact that renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes. Nuclear fission remains the best option for large scale power and is still cheaper than directly comparable renewables with batteries included despite being divested from raising overall costs.
Hopefully we get fusion soon and renewables and fission become a thing of the past.
They are needed for transportation, whatever the way we produce electricity (even with nuclear).
> renewables can’t be used in various industrial processes
Why? There is no difference between nuclear-produced electricy and renewable-produced (or battery-stored)-electricy.
> Hopefully we get fusion soon
Does some optimistic scientist hope to enjoy an industrial prototype before 2050?
Indeed. So? There are more and more vehicles, and the average amount of electricity they store (reflected by their autonomy) grows. One of the reasons is well-known: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
> no forward movement
This isn't true, many experiments are running ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid#Research )
Even EDF, France's leader of the nuclear industry, field-experiments it: https://www.edf.fr/entreprises/transition-energetique/mobili...
> JB Straubel, then chief technology officer of Tesla Inc, discounted V2G, claiming that battery wear outweighs economic benefit.[87] A 2017 study found decreasing capacity,[88][89] and a 2012 hybrid-EV study found minor benefit.[90] A 2015 study[91] found that economic analyses favorable to V2G failed to include many of the less obvious costs associated with its implementation. When these less obvious costs were included, the study reported that V2G was an economically inefficient solution.
... didn't at the time (circa 2015) like V2G because it competed with its Powerwall project. This is a completely obsolete consideration: https://zecar.com/reviews/2024-tesla-model-y-bidirectional-c...
> decreasing capacity
This is true. However this is to put in perspective with the financial impact: batteries are (from a technical viewpoint) more and more able to cope with this and charging during cheap electricity times then partially discharging when electricity is expensive will reduce the overall cost of the vehicle.
> A 2015 study
Obsolete.
I understood that one benefit of molten salt reactors is that the fission products were easier to process or burn.
Edit: "MSRs enable cheaper closed nuclear fuel cycles, because they can operate with slow neutrons. Closed fuel cycles can reduce environmental impacts: chemical separation turns long-lived actinides into reactor fuel. Discharged wastes are mostly fission products with shorter half-lives. This can reduce the needed containment to 300 years versus the tens of thousands of years needed by light-water reactor spent fuel."
Artillery was fired around Zaporizhzhia when the reactors were still online, Ukraine is currently invading Russia near Kursk where two of the mad-graphite RBMK reactors are still operational today. I hope they try to avoid those when blowing stuff up. Because they don't have containment vessels.
And then see how difficult it is to clean up an accident like Fukushima where the containment mostly held. It feels like playing with fire.
Much safer to burn the rest of the planet instead.
We're just adding more risks to the mix. And externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
> externalising more issues to the future which is how we got into this crisis to begin with.
is this the "nuclear would take 20 years" we've been hearing for the last 60?
You’re comparing rubber ducks and battleships
The others created big headlines, but the real human casualties were smaller than a bad traffic accident.
The core argument here is "you never know!". And that argument is always true. But people only apply it to things they're afraid of.
Presumably these are from very long-lived isotopes, so will continue to emit at this rate for the forseeable future.
In contrast, the fission products (from Chernobyl) tend to have short half lives of the order of a few days, giving a short burst of radiation. Caesium 137 looks to be the most troublesome isotope in the long term (with a half life of 30 years). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Relative_is...
The great thing today is that we don't need to accept radioactive releases from either nuclear power or coal. Simply build the cheap scalable option instead: renewables.
You mentioned China. Last year, China brought more than 100x more PV on line than they did nuclear (on a rated power basis; levelized basis maybe 30x as much.)
Please name an industrial ready-to-deploy fast reactor. AFAIK there it doesn't exist, therefore its (after decades of expensive R&D in many nations) just a vague hope, not a potential part of the solution.
Russia BN-600 is obsolete and was so leaky (sodium!) is isn't even funny. It was superseded by the BN-800 which started in 2014 and has various problems (most related to fuel, the core of this challenge). This path is officially paused (a planned BN-1200 project didn't start). If it works satisfactorily, as you implicitly claim, please state why it isn't declined (other units built) while Russia tries another breeder architecture (BREST-300, using lead instead of sodium)?
India is even farther away, encountering major difficulties with a prototype ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Fast_Breeder_Reactor ).
China is also exploring ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600 )
Nothing industrial and ready-to-deploy, as I wrote it.
Phénix is not pertinent, it worked perfectly but was a research reactor (small, expensive...).
Superphenix never reached the industrial stage, even the enterprise exploiting it (NERSA) never said so. They simply declared that they were willing to continue and hoping to reach the goal (13 years after first reactor divergence, 24 years after project start, with gigantic amounts of money poured at the project).